'60 Minutes,' Tool of the State?

By

L. Brent Bozell III

December 24, 2013 - 11:15pm

The New York Times published an unintentionally humorous headline on
December 23: “When ‘60 Minutes’ Checks Its Journalistic Skepticism at
the Door.” Times media columnist David Carr is suddenly stunned that “60
Minutes” has aired a puff piece on a serious political matter.

In his article, Carr didn’t breathe a word about Steve Kroft’s long
history of servile interviews with Barack Obama, most recently in
January when he threw softballs at both Obama and Hillary Clinton at the
president’s request. Carr’s never written about Kroft.

Carr sees “60 Minutes” as a "journalistic treasure" because it's a
rabble-rousing leftist outfit: “For more than four decades, the program
has exposed CIA abuses, rogue military contractors and hundreds of
corporate villains.” So he was upset about the December 15 “60 Minutes,”
which aired an interview with Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the
National Security Agency. He wrote “it was hard to watch the NSA segment
and not wonder who was minding the store.”

The
interviewer in this case was CBS’s John Miller, who Carr suggested was
too close to the subject: “Mr. Miller is a former high-ranking official
in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and a former
spokesman of the FBI whose worldview is built on going after bad guys
and keeping the rest of us safe.”

That must be opposed to the worldview of the New York Times – which is
based on being obsessively concerned with the civil liberties of the bad
guys at the expense of our safety.

Any critic could watch the NSA segment and see it for what it was: a
forum to allow the NSA boss to make his case for their surveillance
programs. What's wrong with that? If that’s inappropriate, why then did
Carr not condemn the December 22 “60 Minutes,” which carried a Lesley
Stahl softball profile of national security adviser Susan Rice, who is
our “whip-smart....quarterback of American foreign policy.”

Stahl puffed up Rice and her “reputation” as an “idealist” who “ran
into a Benghazi buzzsaw.” Rice was “swept up into the dispute” over
Benghazi. Rice the “idealist” didn’t lie on five Sunday news interviews.
Stahl insisted “a former senior intelligence official told us that the
talking point that the Benghazi attack was spontaneous was precisely
what classified intelligence reports said at the time.”

How in blazes is this less of a powder-puff presentation than Miller’s
segment on the NSA? Miller pushed Alexander on how Edward Snowden could
steal millions of secret documents: “This happened on your watch. A
twentysomething-year-old high school dropout contractor managed to walk
out with, in essence, the crown jewels. Did you offer to resign about
the Snowden incident?” The general said yes.

By contrast, Stahl accompanied Rice to her daughter’s Sunday soccer
game (to underline portentously that she’s the first National Security
Adviser to be a mom) before they ended with a brief bit on Benghazi.
Rice fatuously announced “I don’t have time to think about a false
controversy.” Stahl could only ask “But the questions keep coming. I
mean, when someone heard that I was going to be talking to you, they
said, ‘You have to ask her why Hillary Clinton didn’t do the interview
that morning.’ Did she smell trouble?”

Rice claimed Hillary “had just gone through an incredibly painful and
stressful week” because she “had to reach out to the families, had to
greet the bodies upon their arrival at Andrews Air Force Base.” When “60
Minutes” had a chance to ask Hillary why she skipped the Sunday shows,
Steve Kroft failed to do so. He only asked her sympathetically if she
blamed herself for Benghazi.

Carr, like many liberals, thinks the list of CBS offenses began with
its October 27 Benghazi segment with Lara Logan, in which CBS was fooled
by Dylan Davies, who claimed to be an eyewitness on the scene of the
consulate attack, but he wasn’t. That was a serious mistake, an error
compounded by a bungled “eyewitness account” book deal Davies struck
with Simon & Schuster, a corporate cousin of CBS (which they failed
to disclose).

Even in the segments Carr hates – the Benghazi segment and the NSA
segment -- Obama’s mostly absent. The name “Obama” was never uttered in
the Benghazi segment, and this was its one mention by Miller: “Do you
think [German] Chancellor Merkel hears President Obama's calls?”

So why isn’t Carr upset about how Obama doesn’t matter, doesn’t seem to
be president when things go dramatically wrong? Who is “minding the
store” at CBS on holding Obama accountable? As with Kroft, Carr doesn’t
care. Obama’s not the kind of “villain” that “60 Minutes” is supposed to
hunt.

The left's formula is simple. If it's a "60 Minutes" investigative hit
piece against a conservative, it's journalism. If it's a slobbering puff
piece promoting a liberal, it's journalism.

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